VCU School of Medicine on the MCV Campus

10/10/2026

Weeks after finishing her first year of medical school, Megan Castle traveled up to Connecticut for the Yale Summer Institute in Bioethics.

The summer program was an opportunity for Castle to broaden her medical education and learn from the experiences of professionals outside of medicine. Now back on the MCV Campus for her M2 year, she's eager to continue studying bioethics and help her peers explore how these principles will factor into the decisions they'll make every day as physicians.

“Ethics shouldn’t ever be an afterthought,” Castle said. “We should incorporate it into everything we do and ask questions about why we do the things we do. I want to get people thinking in that direction.”

Read more in SOM News: https://medschool.vcu.edu/news/student-life/no-one-right-answer/

10/06/2026

Class of 2030, you clean up nice. ✨

10/01/2026

The Panamerican Trauma Society (PTS), which has been headquartered in the VCU Department of Surgery since 2010, has partnered with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to strengthen emergency care across the Americas. This new five-year agreement provides a framework for the two organizations to enhance emergency preparedness and scale up trauma care, with collaborations on training, simulation exercises, preparedness assessments and after-action reviews.

School of Medicine faculty members, Edgar Rodas, M.D. and Michel Aboutanos, M.D. serve on the PTS board, supporting the society’s mission to improve trauma care throughout the Americas through education, research and professional collaboration.

Learn more: https://www.paho.org/en/news/29-9-2026-paho-and-panamerican-trauma-society-join-forces-expand-care-injured-people-durin

09/30/2026

Fall has officially hit MCV campus 🍂

09/24/2026

What if a drug could help make every unit of donated blood go further?

VCU School of Medicine professor Martin J. Mangino, Ph.D., invented PM-208, a first-in-class intravenous therapy being developed to treat shock and ischemia while reducing the amount of blood needed by trauma patients. Developed by Virginia-based startup Perfusion Medical, PM-208 could have applications in places where blood supplies are limited, from rural hospitals to the battlefield.

The company recently received a Virginia Catalyst grant to support animal studies examining the drug’s blood-sparing effects, bringing the VCU-born innovation another step closer to clinical trials.

Read more in VCU News:

Pascal Medical and Perfusion Medical each received $800,000 from Virginia Catalyst to fund critical studies.

09/22/2026

Hannah Stadtler, an M.D.-Ph.D. student in the School of Medicine’s Medical Scientist Training Program, is one of the first to graduate from the Wright Center’s T32 Translational Biomedical Sciences training program.

Her dissertation, which she defended in February of this year, explored the disproportionate burden of cognitive impairment that women with HIV face compared with men with HIV and women without it. She's now back on the clinical side of her M.D.-Ph.D., and she hopes to keep science and medicine in constant dialogue.

“That’s the beauty of translational research – because that’s always the goal: to better people’s lives, and to really use science to answer some of these really critical questions,” Stadtler said. “The two are so intertwined, and I feel medicine is nothing without research. And I think great research comes from gaps in medicine.”



https://news.vcu.edu/article/hannah-stadtler-completes-her-phd-with-a-mission-to-understand-hiv-and-the-brain

09/21/2026

Florence Neal Cooper Smith is known as the “mother of sickle cell disease” in Virginia — since the 1960s, she’s worked tirelessly to raise awareness about the disease, support research and ensure access to treatment.

At her recent 95th birthday party, she and about 130 people celebrated these efforts and the endowed professorship in her name that has been elevated to an endowed chair. Held by Wally Smith, M.D., director of the VCU Health Sickle Cell Program, this endowed chair will strengthen the long-term impact of the endowment on sickle cell research and care.

Community groups have successfully raised funds to elevate an endowed professorship honoring Florence Neal Cooper Smith into an endowed chair, recognizing her lifelong advocacy for sickle cell disease research.

09/19/2026

A new plaque in the McGlothlin Medical Education Center honors the career of the 1962 alumnus and former faculty member whose dignity and grace in the face of racial discrimination inspired classmates and faculty to advocate for changes in medical school policy.

Christian had 11 nieces and nephews, including Arthur Christian Jr. and Nadra Christian Franklin, who shared memories of their beloved Uncle Charles during the ceremony. The cousins described him as not only quiet, patient, compassionate and kind, but also a devoted uncle who always made time for his family and went out of his way to pass along his wisdom to his nieces and nephews. Nadra spoke of the inheritance her uncle left behind for her, both materially and emotionally, and described inheritance as not simply "what someone leaves you," but also "a way of being."

"What VCU is doing today is an act of stewardship, making certain that students who never had the privilege of meeting Dr. Charles Christian Fletcher will know that he was here, that his life mattered and that they now share the responsibility for sharing that medical inheritance.”

A new plaque in the McGlothlin Medical Education Center honors the career of the 1962 alumnus and former faculty member whose dignity and grace in the face of racial discrimination inspired classmates and faculty to advocate for changes in medical school policy.

09/18/2026

Laura Ingles, news and editorial director at the
VCU School of Medicine, explored the concept of neuroplastic pain — a type of chronic pain that’s driven by an oversensitive nervous system rather than ongoing structural damage - as both a patient and a reporter.

Read about the science behind neuroplastic pain and her personal journey with pain reprocessing therapy at https://bit.ly/sompain (link in bio 🔗)

09/18/2026

When Taylor Crouch, Ph.D., an assistant professor and researcher in the Department of Psychiatry, explains neuroplastic pain to a patient for the first time, she often compares it to a malfunctioning smoke detector.

“With acute pain, the alarm is going off because there’s smoke in the kitchen, and it’s telling us there is a fire,” she said. “With neuroplastic pain, the problem is that the alarm’s going off — that’s not imagined; it’s very real — but not because of a fire. It’s going off because the sensor has become faulty over time and is too sensitive.”

Laura Ingles, news and editorial director at the VCU School of Medicine, explored the concept of neuroplastic pain — a type of chronic pain that’s driven by an oversensitive nervous system rather than ongoing structural damage — as both a patient and a reporter.

https://medschool.vcu.edu/news/around-campus/interrupting-the-cycle/